Shooting Wildlife

Over the last couple of days I have carrying my camera around to try and capture some of the wildlife that I am seeing around the farm at the moment. This lovely spell of warm weather is really bringing the wildlife out to enjoy it as much as I am. The picture (above) about shows 7 Brown Hares (BAP Species) adults and young all enjoying the morning sunshine on a recently mowed pollen and nectar mix. The area measures 0.70 Ha and is really crammed with wildlife. The hares were enjoying the shelter of the Oilseed Rape should any predators pass by.

Up on the top of Bredon Hill our resident herd of Fallow Deer are also basking in the sunshine. These are young males that gather together at this time of year. This field hasn't been planted yet as it is part of the hand picked peas operation and will be planted in June.

This little guy was probably the best find of the day (and his 3 other siblings). The Lapwing parents were getting very cross with me as I sneaked up to take the picture of a young Lapwing chick foraging for insects in a flooded part of a wheat field. It's an area of very poor drainage and under the Higher Level Stewardship Scheme I have plans to put a pond here but I might just excavate the scrape more to provide lots of wet feeding grounds for the next generations of lapwings.

Dear Oh Deer

On these warm spring days it is great to spend a bit of time trying to find a little more of our wildlife that we have on the farm.  I managed to take this picture up on the hill of three fallow deer, sunning themselves and having a quick breakfast .  (It was last week, before winter returned!).  We have quite a healthy population of Fallow and Roe deer on the farm and also a few Muntjac deer as well, which are treated as more of a pest.  It is nice to see a few deer around on the farm although they can cause quite a lot of damage when numbers are high.  Damage includes grazing grass and crops, knocking over stone walls, when they try and jump over them, destroying any newly planted tree saplings and crashing through electric sheep fence.

They spend much of the time out in the fields, grazing our combinable crops or eating grass, meant for the sheep.  Sometimes they are found in the woodland, which is not a problem in a mature woodland but we now have to fence them out of any new woodland plantings as they would decimate the newly planted trees.

They soon become a very expensive addition to our wildlife up on the hill.